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them into the hot lard for my Uncle Jimmy and me. And
when she fished them out, they were all swelled up and "pussy," and

golden brown.
And there was pie. Neither at the school nooning nor at the table did
one put a piece of pie upon a plate and haggle at it with a fork. You
took the piece of pie up in your hand and pointed the sharp end toward
you, and gently crowded it into your face. It didn't require much
pressure either.
And there were always apples, real apples. I think they must make
apples in factories nowadays. They taste like it. These were real ones,
picked off the trees. Out at grandpap's they had bellflowers, and
winesaps, and seek-no-furthers, and, I think, sheep-noses, and one kind
of apple that I can't find any more, though I have sought it carefully. It
was the finest apple I ever set a tooth in. It was the juiciest and the
spiciest apple. It had sort of a rollicking flavor to it, if you know what I
mean. It certainly was the ne plus ultra of an apple. And the name of it
was the rambo. Dear me, how good it was! think I'd sooner have one
right now than great riches. And all these apples they kept in the
apple-hole. You went out and uncovered the earth and there they were,
all in a big nest of straw; and such a gush of perfume distilled from that
pile of them that just to recollect it makes my mouth all wet.
They had a big red apple in those days that I forget the name of. Oh, it
was a whopper! You'd nibble at it and nibble at it before you could get
a purchase on it. Then, after you got your teeth in, you'd pull and pull,
and all of a sudden the apple would go "tock!" and your head would fly
back from the recoil, and you had a bite about the size of your hand.
You "chomped" on it, with your cheek all bulged out, and blame near
drowned yourself with the juice of it.
Noon-time the girls used to count the seeds:
"One I love, two I love, three my love I see; Four I love with all my
heart, and five I cast away. Six he loves; seven she loves; eight . . .
eight . . . "
I forget what eight is, and all that follows after. And then the others
would tease her with, "Aw, Jennie!" knowing who it was she had

named the apple for, Wes. Rinehart, or 'Lonzo Curl, or whoever. And
you'd be standing there by the stove, kind of grinning and not thinking
of anything in particular when somebody would hit you a clout on your
back that just about broke you in two, and would tell you "to pass it
on," and you'd pass it on, and the next thing was you'd think the house
was coming down. Such a chasing around and over benches, and
upsetting the water-bucket, and tearing up Jack generally that teacher
would say, "Boys! boys! If you can't play quietly, you'll have to go out
of doors!" Play quietly! Why, the idea! What kind of play is it when
you are right still?
Outdoors in the country, you can whoop and holler, and carry on, and
nobody complains to the board of health. And there are so many things
you can do. If there is just the least little fall of snow you can make a
big wheel, with spokes in it, by your tracking. I remember that it was
called "fox and geese," but that's all I can remember about it. If there
was a little more snow you tried to wash the girls' faces in it, and
sometimes got yours washed. If there was a good deal of wet snow you
had a snowball fight, which is great fun, unless you get one right smack
dab in your ear - oh, but I can't begin to tell you all the fun there is at
the noon hour in the country school, that the town children don't know
anything about. And when it was time for school to "take up," there
wasn't any forming in line, with a monitor to run tell teacher who
snatched off Joseph Humphreys' cap and flung it far away, so he had to
get out of the line, and who did this, and who did that - no penitentiary
business at all. Teacher tapped on the window with a ruler, and the
boys and girls came in, red-faced and puffing, careering through the
aisles, knocking things off the desks with many a burlesque, "oh,
exCUSE me!" and falling into their seats, bursting into sniggers, they
didn't